Origins of Life?

The essence and origins of life. What is it? Yes, we can define characteristics that differentiated the living from the non-living. The building blocks of life are still not the same as a simple virus. Do you think new forms of life "become living" these days?. Do you think that the conditions to form new life simply do not exist anymore? Evolution can not even begin until something (still yet unknown to us) happens first. Do you think we will ever discover the recipe?

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As described in The Bible, for example, he is living. He makes things, can be jealous, has a family (his son Jesus, and his pal The Holy Ghost). He's a rather strange living being even if he doesn't fit the biological standards of biological life. He's not biological, he's a spiritual being.

The first five books were written by four separate authors, over a 4-5 hundred year period. The group known as the Yahwist (J) Source, because they almost always spoke of him as Yahweh, wrote around 950 BCE, in the Southern Kingdom of Judah, and created an anthropomorphic god, who took strolls in the Garden of Eden, "in the cool of the day" (the A/C was on the fritz in heaven, and you know how much it costs to fix those!), and let Cain backtalk, ("Hey, Dude - am I my brother's keeper?"), while the Elohist (E) Source, known for referring to the big guy as Elohim, wrote from the Northern Kingdom of Israel in 850 BCE, bringing their work with them to Jerusalem in 722, when they escaped the Northern Kingdom when it was overrun by Assyrians in that year. The two works were then joined into a single work, JE.

After the fall of Jerusalem in the 500's, a third group, known as the Priestly (P) Source, held in captivity in Babylon, decided that the reason the Jews had had such screwed up luck over the previous couple of hundred years, was because they had moved too far away from their god's original intentions, so they rewrote much of what the Yahwist Source had written, removing the human aspect that they felt caused people to have less respect for him because he seemed too much like themselves, and gave him a more ethereal, spiritual window dressing, believing that their work, as in Orwell's 1984, would replace the Yahwist's version, essentially rewriting the perceived history of the Jewish people - didn't happen. Instead the group who redacted the various versions, and wove them as best they could into a patchwork quilt, often put the Yahwist's version and the Priestly version side by side, not wanting to piss off god in case they chose the wrong version, creating conflicting stories, such as the two versions of the creation, the first written by the Priestly Source and the second, by the Yahwist group, as well as the stories of how many animals went into Noah's boat, The Minnow, and many others.

While not the same as creating life, we currently have the means, through genetic engineering, to manipulate existing life, and most humans I know are not even to be trusted with doing that. Until we, as a species, gain a great deal more wisdom, possibly we should leave the life-creation business to nature.

I had a chemistry set as a kid, and I threw chemicals together at random just to see what would happen. Luckily, I didn't blow our house up, but the memories of that experience give me reason to believe that possibly we have some more maturing to do before we start playing, "What if --?"

I recall, from Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, that the "monster" was in fact not a monster at all, but the victim of Victor Frankenstein's egoistic ambition. And from "Jurassic Park," there's Jeff Goldbloom's line, "Just because you could do it, doesn't mean you should."

I think we would want to in order to gain a perspective on how complex organic molecules transitioned into simple replicators , then became proto cells . While the mechanism we come up may in fact be different from the one that actually occurred on primitive Eatth billion of years ago , any knowledge gleaned could provide us great insight as to how this first step took place .